Documenting art processes

I am currently an Animator-In-Residence at Passion Works Studio, Athens, OH
It is a delight to be working with such a diverse and talented crew of artists. Passion Works is a welcoming, creative studio for people with developmental disabilities. The studio welcomes artists in the community to work with their artists. The PW artists are generating the images and imaginative narratives while I provide the technical workflow to make the movie happen. Check out some behind the scenes footage of two PW artists hard at work making a space scene! Fred is making the stars twinkle with a scrim and Noah is puppeteering a fleet of alien spaceships.

Starting a new project in collaboration with artist Laurel Farrin. I admire her works for many reasons. In particular, her static images contain a certain potential energy. I am attempting to digitally deconstruct her paintings . Once deconstructed, the former fixed elements of the painting become a plasticized material for animation studies. The material and shape of the “unfixed” images inform their animated behavior. I’m also interested in experimenting with the perceived materiality of the shape. In this first example a green object expands like a lofty balloon but falls like a cement brick. These contrasts in material weight will be interesting to play with.

The second example in the video below deconstructs a painting of a whimsical block tower. The individual blocks were mapped with a surface shader in Maya to 3D models approximating their 2D shape. Using Maya’s gravity and rigid active body attributes, the former fixed elements from the painting submit to gravity and tumble away from the picture plane.

A structuralist film study of the infinite design possibilities provided by the truchet tile. Using a simple truchet tile as a pattern for tessellation, Truchet 1 generates a thrilling, infinitely random series of patterns. Hand-drawn shapes reveal the material of both the truchet’s medium and process. Grain of the paper and imperfect pencil fills add to the film’s deep textural aesthetic. The frenetic pace of Truchet 1 is derived from the editing alone. The tiles themselves are static, in both position and time. The illusion of animation is created through dynamic contrasts between the opposing orientation of individual tiles. The inherent plasticity of digital video allows for fine, frame accurate swapping of tiles. A flickering graphic conflict occurs onscreen when tiles are randomly juxtaposed. Positive and negative space collide, swap places and seem to swirl and pulse across the viewer’s eyes, generating the optical illusion of animation.

Does Photoshop not have enough randomized line and kitty cat filters for you? Then download CatBurster1! A drawing program that creates randomized space lines and a cat! It’s actually my first foray into generative art with Processing.

To download go to www.bessoff.com/processing
left click on CatBurster1.zip
unzip file and double click CatBurster1
Paint with a cat by clicking and dragging the mouse
Mac OSX only (Must have Java 8 installed too)

Here is a whopping 15 seconds of animation from the new project, Lingua Absentia. All animation is in camera shot on a multi-plane animation stand with 2d, jointed, paper puppets. Stay tuned! There’s more to come!